How to prepare a design for printing
Nowadays, the beginning of any physical printing is its computerized manifestation, or, to put it in human terms, a graphic design. Depending on the printing technique, the design must be prepared in the correct format.
Below you will find a list of the most popular file formats and the types of printing in which they are applicable.
Raster (bitmap) graphics
According to Wikipedia:
Raster graphics – the presentation of an image using a vertical and horizontal grid of appropriately colored pixels on a computer monitor, printer or other output device.
Sounds rather complicated, doesn’t it? In fact, it’s nothing more than an “ordinary” graphics file with which any person operating a computer has to deal every day, such as the popular .jpg. From raster graphics you can directly print in the following techniques:
Very importantly, in order for the print to have the right quality, the file must have sufficient resolution. There is no way to make a large and good-looking print for an entire T-shirt from such a small image as the example below….
…Well, unless you are satisfied with such an effect:
A bitmap file can be compared to a balloon. We can “inflate” it, but only to a certain extent. If we blow too hard, the balloon will burst. Similarly, the quality of an artificially inflated bitmap will “burst”. How a file can be reworked to meet sufficient standards you will read below in the paragraph “Vectorization”.
Popular formats for saving raster files: JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP
Vector graphics
According to Wikipedia:
A type of computer graphics in which the image is described by geometric figures, located in a mathematically defined two-dimensional coordinate system.
Despite such a technical description, you don’t need a degree in mathematics to create vector graphics 🙂 Vector graphics is not limited to geometric figures. A good graphic designer, can prepare virtually any image in vectors. From vector files we make embellishments using these methods:
The biggest advantage of vector graphics, from the point of view of printing, is its scalability. This means that the design can be enlarged to any size without losing quality. Bitmap, unfortunately, does not have this capability. The man who invents a method for lossless upscaling of bitmap will be one of the richest people in the world 🙂
File format is not everything. What matters is how the information is stored in it. For example, you can save a bitmap in Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW, but this will not make it a vector design. Of course, from a file prepared in vector format you can also print seamlessly in all techniques that support raster graphics.
Popular formats for saving vector files: CDR, AI, EPS, SVG
Vectorization
Vectorization is the process of converting bitmap to vectors, which from the perspective of print production is a more universal way of saving files. This is the visualization of the vectorization process:
The file format itself is not everything. What matters is how the information is stored in it. For example, you can save a bitmap in Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW, but that doesn’t make it a vector project. Only converting the graphic to so-called curves will make the project a full-fledged vector file.
Popular vectorization programs include Corel, Adobe Flash, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe FreeHand, among others.
The vectorization process of almost any bitmap deforms its original appearance and most often corrections by a graphic designer are needed. Only a bitmap representing a simple shape has a chance to be correctly transformed without additional human intervention.
In general, the higher the resolution of the output raster file, the easier it is to carry out its vectorization. With output files of very low resolution, the design is actually created from scratch.
The reverse process to vectorization is rasterization of graphics. In this case, no special graphic skills are needed and most often the whole process comes down to simply saving the file in the desired format.
A properly prepared file is the starting point for any type of printing. It’s worth putting some effort into this step or entrusting it to a professional graphic designer, because the final appearance of the print depends on the quality of the file.
Are you interested in this article?
- Find out more by contacting us.
Tips
- What is the best grammage for a t-shirt?
- To sew or not to sew – that is the question!
- How to prepare a design for printing
- How to create your own clothing brand?
- To wash or not to wash? That is the Question!
- All tips
- Price list for marking
